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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Mitsuku wins Loebner Prize 2013

Steve Worswick, botmaster of Mitsuku, was awarded the bronze medal and $4000 cash prize for creating the world's "most human computer" in the Loebner Prize Contest 2013, an annual Turing Test. The contest this year was held at the Ulster University, Magee Campus, Londonderry/Derry, Northern Ireland. Steve Worswick is a native of Yorkshire, UK, and has worked on Mitsuku for 9 years. Mitsuku is based on AIML and hosted at Pandorabots.com.

This year the Loebner Prize Contest attracted 15 entries from around the world. Pandorabots submitted 6 of those entries, based on the results of an internal Divabot contest to select the best, most unique AIML bots hosted by Pandorabots. Of these six, 3 were selected for the Loebner contest finals. In fact, 3 out of the four finalists were all Pandorabots.

Each of the four finalists was interrogated by four judges and ranked on a scale of 1 to 4, from most human to least human. The judges, selected for their expertise in artificial intelligence, simultaneously interrogated a bot and a human confederate, and were asked to decide which entity was human and which was a robot. None of programs fooled any of the judges into thinking that the bots were human, so the real contest became which bot ranked highest. The final results of the competition were:

The contest day this year also featured, for the second time, a Junior Loebner Contest with teenagers serving as judges and human confederates. In the junior contest, the results were:

1. Tie for first place (Mistuku and Tutor)
2. Tie for second place (Rose and Izar)

The AIML bots all ran on a version of the open source Program AB, the reference interpreter for AIML 2.0., modified for the Loebner Prize contest. Specifically, the contest program implements the Loebner Prize Protocol, an obscure character-mode communications protocol specific to the contest. But because the bots were developed on a Pandorabots server running AIML 1.1, none of the finalists used any new AIML 2.0 features. Mitsuku however has some clever implementations of knowledge bases and deductive reasoning, using AIML 1.1 alone.

We are pleased that another AIML bot besides ALICE has won the Loebner Prize. This result shows the strength of the underlying technology for creating award-winning bots. AIML is an excellent tool for designing high-quality, content-rich AI chat bots. The finalists in this year's Loebner Prize contest, and its winner Mitsuku, demonstrate the quality of bots that can be written in AIML.

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About Dr. Richard Wallace

Dr. Richard S. Wallace formed the ALICE A. I. Foundation in 2001 to promote the development and adoption of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and ALICE free software. Dr. Wallace has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.